Forty-one years ago:  the Soviets’ crushing of the “Prague Spring,” the “brave rebirth of national pride and expectation”

Forty-one years ago today, LIFE published an extraordinary 19-page story, with the magazine’s vivid trademark photographs, on the crushing of the “Prague Spring,” the Czechoslovakian experiment with openness and Socialist liberalism that LIFE called a “brief idyl of liberation, the brave rebirth of national pride and expectation.” The invasion of Czechoslovakia by nearly 5,000 Soviet tanks and 165,000 troops (along with forces from four other Soviet-bloc countries) had begun 10 days earlier, on Tuesday, August 20th.  The invaders were met by thousands of mostly youthful street-protesters, and though the confrontations turned violent–thirty-eight protesters were killed–there was no massive or official retaliation.

Meanwhile, in Chicago….

Halfway around the world, in Chicago, thousands of politicians and protesters were beginning to gather in anticipation of the Democratic Party’s national nominating convention.  And the events in Czechoslovakia weighed very heavily on both sides.  Senator George McGovern, a trailing candidate for the nomination that would eventually be won by Hubert Humphrey, lashed out at the Johnson administration, saying it must “bear a considerable part of the blame of the Soviet Union’s military takeover of Czechoslovakia.”  McGovern’s and others’ efforts to obtain an antiwar plank in the party’s platform were crumbling in the face of the Soviet actions.   The story in Czechoslovakia was, in America, refracted through the lens of the ongoing American debacle in Vietnam. McGovern spoke for many when he said: “You cannot justify intervention in Vietnam on the grounds that our security is threatened by a government 10,000 miles away without inviting the Russians to intervene because they feel threatened by a government on their own border.” (NYT 8/24/68).

Czechoslovakia and Vietnam: a 1968 linkage

In a lengthy editorial in this issue of LIFE, Thomas Griffith also made the linkage between the Soviet invasion and the war in Vietnam, especially the effect of the invasion on American politicians’ constantly shifting stances on the war.  ”In the past year, this nation has undergone a remarkable swing of opinion about the war in Vietnam–so much so that names like hawk and dove no longer fit.  The longing to get out is widespread, and peace with honor the common cry.”  Still, the “tanks of Prague” made it much less likely that Americans would look favorably on an end to the Vietnam war that entailed substantial concessions to the Communist North.

Covering Prague in 1968

The convergence of events in Prague and Chicago would have another, unexpected result in the way that 1968 was “covered.”  As reported by New York Times TV critic Jack Gould on August 23, 1968, The CBS Evening News expanded the night before from a half hour (it had been a 15-minute show only 5 years earlier) to a full hour “because of the heavy volume of news,” and said that the format afforded “a less hurried presentation of the day’s developments,” and lessened “the need for the compression of stories into cryptic bulletins.”  Walter Cronkite presided over an hour of news that focused in its first half on Czechoslovakia and world reaction, and in the 2nd half to developments at the DNC in Chicago, as well as to stories from Vietnam and Bogotá (a visit by Pope Paul VI). “Easing the tyranny of time that always hangs so heavily over electronic journalists might have interesting and fruitful consequences,” Gould concluded.  The expansion of the nightly news to a full hour did not last, but exactly a month later, CBS would launch a one-hour news program called 60 Minutes.  More on the debut of that durable show in a later post.

“Laugh-In.”  All by itself, the word conjures a cascade of 1960s images and memories.

Even more specifically, this incredibly popular television show has for decades been a stand-in for 1968– or perhaps better, “1968″: the pervasive mythologizing of the Sixties’ most notorious single year, a required clip in every “Sixties montage” (or even lampoons of “Sixties montages,” as can be seen on The Simpsons.)

1968’s Top-Rated TV Show

Conveniently launching at the beginning of the year (January 22) as NBC’s mid-season replacement for The Man from U.N.C.L.E.–the spy-caper series that had run out of steam–Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In soon rocketed to the top of the ratings charts and stayed there for the rest of the season and again for the next (1968-69). (Amazingly, two other shows–both on CBS–that overlapped with Laugh-In on Monday nights were also in the top ten that year:  Gunsmoke and Here’s Lucy.)

“Revolutionary”?  Maybe not.

With its vibrant, pulsating colors; the raunchy or topical joke-making; the blindingly quick cuts (over 300 separate segments in each one-hour show, according to Steven Stark’s 1997 book, Glued to the Set), Laugh-In certainly looked and sounded revolutionary and transgressive, at least on the surface.  But down deep (if that’s not an oxymoron in this context), it adhered to formulas familiar to anyone who had been watching TV since its Milton Berle beginnings 20 years earlier.  It was a variety show, with a strong stock company of players (Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin being the show’s most famous alumnae); a pair of urbane, tuxedoed hosts; musical acts (the “psychedelic” band Strawberry Alarm Clock appeared in the opening night’s lineup); comic sketches that were long on slapstick and pratfalls; and a boatload of guest stars doing embarrassing things.

A record of zaniness

In the absence of home VHS or DVDs, how were the producers going to keep the show’s fans pumped up, beyond the expectation of summer re-runs?  This record album, issued as the show’s first half-season ended, was one solution. The colorful cover features cut-outs with the show’s stars peeping through–just like the trademark “Joke Wall” that ended every episode.   ”Dan and Dick” (i.e., Rowan and Martin) provide the rationale, such as it is, for the album in the liner notes:  ”Since we are constantly being stopped on the street by the people who tell us that ‘Laugh-In’ moves to fast they don’t get all the jokes, we decided to put out this album to further confuse them. . . . Here, then, at last for home consumption is some of the madness for you to play and replay until you figure it out.”    The 1960s were the heyday of comedy record albums–one only has to think of “The First Family,” or Bill Cosby’s records, or Bob Newhart’s, or — on the smuttier side– the records put out by black comics Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx.  But a Laugh-In record?  Even the show’s producer, George Schlatter, was quoted in a magazine interview that Laugh-In was “all visual.  You can listen to other TV shows and get the drift, but you have to watch this.”  (Glued to the Set, p. 144)

Do you have a favorite Laugh-In moment?

What does Laugh-In have to do with the Sixties?

EYE magazine, where hipness met consumerism, was a brief candle amidst the flickering lights of the 1960s.

EYE magazine was a short-lived (15 issues, 1968-69) effort by the Hearst Corporation to cash on the exploding youth market in publishing (and, of course, in advertising profits).  The rainbow logo, with its echoes of Peter Max and  ”Op” art, gives you a hint right away.  Hearst was already publishing Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and Harper’s Bazaar– and EYE, it seems, was largely meant for younger, female readers, to judge strictly by the advertising in this issue:  makeup, perfumes, hair products, more makeup, handbags, and a Wonder Bread (”Helps catch boys!”) ad inside the back cover:  ”Don’t forget this: boys love to eat. And they love Wonder sandwiches.”).

The Beatles–two of them, at least–and “Beautiful Persons.”

This issue features counterculture superstar John Lennon, in an oddly unmemorable (not to mention poorly focused) photograph by Linda Eastman, already gaining a reputation for her portraits of rock musicians.  He and Paul McCartney had been in New York in May for a whirlwind visit in connection with the creation of Apple Corps, their new company.  Their “101 hours” in New York are chronicled by Lillian Roxon, the Australian journalist who would soon be publishing her “Rock Encyclopedia,” a landmark in rock history.  Roxon was a Contributing Editor at Eye, and was responsible in this issue for two other pieces.  The first is a feature called “Elevator: People on the Way Up (and Down),” in which she calls the reader’s attention to 27-year-old “Mike Cimino,” who had just won the award for the World’s Best Television Commercial (a spot for Eastman Kodak), and who had his eye set on doing something big in Hollywood.  (As Michael Cimino, he would direct The Deerhunter and win an Oscar in 1978).   The second is an embarrassing one-page sermon on “Cosmetics of the Soul,” described as “the art of being as beautiful inside as outside. . . . Whatever you want to call it, it’s what everyone wants to be these day.  A Beautiful Person.”

Glitz, glamour, and guys with money

EYE was well known for its high-quality inserts:  foldout posters of celebrities, a record, a comic book (Spiderman).  In this issue, there are record reviews, a car review (the Bond-ish Lotus Europa), a fashion spread (fake furs, sexy models), an article about flying a glider, an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s best-selling The Pump House Gang, an article about student radicals, and a gushing profile of four under-30 male entrepreneurial success stories, with the guys posing together in a bank vault: “Members of a generation in a hurry . . . not likely to stand still waiting for Success to happen.”

The conquest of cool

Though it was a brief candle in the life of Sixties publishing, EYE might well stand as Exhibit A for the “rise of hip consumerism” so well documented by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool (1997)–the rather rapid “discovery” that hipness and the counterculture were easily converted into commodities, and could be effective bandwagons for making money, even for corporations as historically identified with the conservative Establishment as Hearst.

One of the most famous covers of the 1960s:  the spectacular Naomi Sims appears on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal.

In November 1968, Ladies’ Home Journal-- ”The Magazine Women Believe In”–featured  the first black “cover girl” in the history of this long-lived and influential magazine, the first, actually, on any “mainstream” (i.e., white) women’s magazine.  The cover was in the news very recently, illustrating the New York Times obituary for Sims who died August 1, 2009, at the age of 61.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/fashion/04sims.html?_r=1

When she appeared on this cover in 1968, Sims was not an unknown: she had appeared the year before on the cover of a Times fashion supplement, and by the next year was seen nationwide in an AT&T ad campaign on television and in print.  But still, the LHJ cover was big news, coming toward the end of a turbulent year in American race relations. The Journal had been the most prestigious women’s mag since the turn of the 20th century, far outpacing rivals McCall’s, Redbook, and Women’s Day, if not in circulation then certainly in cultural significance and influence.

A complete woman

And it’s a great cover shot:  She’s wearing a crocheted outfit–very much of the moment, but something that “even a beginner could finish in eight hours.”   Sims’ dark skin is amply revealed, and her long (5′10″) body is curled up and perfectly fitting into the rectangular outline of the cover:  ”This is a complete woman,” the photo seems to say: “Black is Beautiful.”  She was 21 years old.

More than just a pretty face

The LHJ editors knew what they were doing when they hired her.  She was not going to be just a mannequin for that crocheted ouftit, assigned the usual mute role for cover girls.  No, this was a Culturally Significant Moment, and the editors gave her not only the cover but a huge spread inside, and an “exclusive interview” with editor Diana Lurie.  The interview begins slowly, cruising around details about what’s it’s really like being a model, then it gets to the elephant in the room:  race.  ”My mother felt that the Negro was inferior, and she lived in poor white neighborhood [in Pittsburgh].  In kindergarten, I can remember being the only Negro in an all-white school. . . I get questions all the time about being Negro.  I hate having to be made aware and always having to use my brain about being Negro.  After Martin Luther King’s assassination, somebody said, ‘Now you’re really going to work, baby.’ . . . Beauty does surpass prejudice at a point, yet sometimes the effort people are making to assimilate us seems contrived.”

Stereotypes don’t go away overnight

If Sims’ cover appearance was history-making, the rest of the magazine seemed still to be treading the water of racial stereotypes.   African Americans appear in exactly two other places in the entire 200-page issue, both of them advertisements: An ad for Samsonite, in which a black luggage porter is helping a white damsel-in-distress at JFK Terminal; and an ad for Calgonite dishwasher detergent with the caption “The prettiest dishes in America use Calgonite,” and 34 headshots of apparently “average” pretty American women (the “dishes” of the caption, one assumes), four of whom, remarkably, are black.

And finally, how many people, I wonder, in 1968 noticed the stunning, almost perverse, contrast presented by the BACK cover of this historic issue of Ladies’ Home Journal?  Here it is, without comment.

A virtual checklist of 1968 preoccupations: From Vietnam to urban violence to “The Pill” and why kids smoke pot: All “digested” and ready to read:  it’s Reader’s Digest.

Reader’s Digest is one of the most durable institutions in American publishing. Founded in 1922, the magazine still claims to be the most widely read magazine in America, a claim that it has been able to make for decades.  Its formula for years was familiar, and was stated inside every month above the lead article:  ”An article a day of enduring significance, in condensed permanent booklet form.”  Reader’s Digest (unlike National Geographic: see earlier “Covering 1968″ post) was very much a part of my middle-class family’s life in the 1950s and 60s, a virtually indispensable back-of-the-commode companion.

Unlike today, Reader’s Digest in 1968 was still being published monthly, so theoretically I had 12 possible choices to write about.   This April issue fell into my lap by chance, but it turns out to contain an especially impressive collection of stories, covering the waterfront of 1968 issues almost as if following a checklist:

• Former president Dwight D. Eisenhower writes an original, copyrighted piece on the war in Vietnam and the protests against it. “In my long life of service to my country, I have never encountered a situation more depressing than the present spectacle of an America deeply divided over a war.”  Predictably, he harkened back to World War II:  ”Neither I nor any other military leader had to lie awake nights wondering whether the folks back home would stick with us to the end.”
• Pearl S. Buck–at the time the only American woman to hold the Nobel Prize in Literature–writes about “The Pill” (she doesn’t mention the words “birth control”), which has a “potential effect on our society . . . even more devastating than the nuclear bomb.”
• “Hell Week in Vietnam,” a condensation of Time magazine reporting on the Tet Offensive
• A piece by arch-conservative RD editor William Schulz on Martin Luther King’s planned “Poor People’s Army”  march on Washington — “a matter of grave concern.”  He writes: “The nation faces international humiliation,” and “Communism’s worldwide propaganda apparatus is set for a field day.”  (King had been assassinated on April 4, 1968, after this issue was printed.)  In a related article also printed here, “Is Insurrection Brewing in the United States?” the answer is “Yes, it is quite possible.”
• An article by “Anonymous” (”a recent college graduate”) on “Why Students Turn to Drugs”:  ”The true ‘pothead’ may turn on with marijuana every evening.  Consciously or not, he has renounced the ’straight’ world, divorcing himself from reality.”

A couple of other observations:

“The Wisdom of Wildness,” by famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, originally published a few months earlier in Life, is condensed and reprinted here.  Lindbergh was well into his years of self re-invention as an environmentalist and spokesman for conservation movements.  The environmental movement is more often associated with the 1970s, and with liberal politics.  Here it is, however, in the 1960s, and in one of the most politically conservative magazines on the market.

I was once again surprised about the growing interest, to judge by the plethora of advertisements, in dieting and weight-loss products, such as Metrecal, Ayds, and Instant Breakfast–not a trend I expected to find in 1968.   (See my earlier post about 1968 bestsellers–Rod  McKuen poetry vying with diet books.)

And 1968 appears to have also been the breakthrough year for color television, to judge by the number of ads.  (Statistics bear this out:  the percentage of U.S. households with color TVs went from just under 10 percent in 1966 to nearly 25 percent by the end of 1968, according to the comprehensive website, tvhistory.tv)

The wacky adventures of Archie Andrews and his friends–permanently enrolled in Riverdale High School, somewhere in the United States–began appearing in comic books just a few weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  The Archie franchise moved quickly from comic books to a radio series and newspaper funny pages in the 1940s.   But it was as comic book characters that they are best remembered, and in 1968 the comics were still going strong (though the price had gone up from 10 to 12 cents).  In fact, that year might be said to constitute a major milestone in the life of this durable series.  See that little miniature drawing above the title on this cover?  Yes, that’s “The Archies,” the fictional garage band (well, of COURSE it’s fictional–all of the band’s members are cartoon characters) that cut its first album in 1968 and became an animated cartoon series on television, tying in with the launch of the band.  The group appears in a story in this issue, saving the day by stepping in as a substitute for a string quartet at the annual teachers’ “tea dance.”   In the cover image, that’s blonde Betty Cooper on the left, attired in hip-huggers; rich, brunette Veronica Lodge on the right, in mod go-go boots; and the combo itself:  Archie on guitar, Jughead Jones on drums; and Reggie Mantle on bass.  (If the catchy beat of The Archies’ hit single of 1969, “Sugar, Sugar,” suddenly and annoyingly popped into your head, my apologies.)

The characters of Archie and his friends were said to be inspired by the successful “Andy Hardy” series of the 1930s, though in the world of Archie, there are no counterparts to the wise Judge Hardy (Andy’s dad) among the series’ buffoonish adults (the school principal, Mr. Weatherby; spinster schoolteacher Miss Grundy; tycoon Mr. Lodge, etc.).  In the 1950s, Archie and his friends (along with the somewhat similar Dobie Gillis gang) became widely recognized as stand-ins for “Typical Teenagers,” something of an obsession of that decade.  They changed very little over the years, even as the teenage years and youth culture in general became more complicated in the 1960s.  Hints, however, are dropped every now and then into these pages that the counterculture and the generation gap were affecting even these “average” teens and their followers (who were kids and pre-teens, for the most part).   There is that band, after all–unthinkable, probably, without the precedents of the British bands and their American imitators (e.g., the Monkees) in the 1960s.  And there’s an ad in this issue for “Psychedelic Poster Covers” for books; they’re “mind-blowing,” with “groovy love slogans.”   Finally, there is a panel in one story in this issue in which Archie’s lazy friend Jughead shows up at the Andrews’ front door, yawning and saying: “Is there a place for us guys who don’t want to make love OR war?”

American magazines have been one of the minor (but significant) indicators of class since their beginning in the 19th century.  That is, one doesn’t acquire magazines only as reading material, but also as visible markers of status and as a legible codes of identity.    Coffee tables may not even function primarily as tables for coffee, but as platforms for the display of attainment (or at least aspiration), as indicated by the magazines artfully splayed across them.

In 1968, as indeed it had been for much of the 20th century, the unchanging, unmistakeable cover of a National Geographic magazine in ones living room was a powerful icon of class.  There weren’t many homes in the working-class neighborhood of postwar tract homes where I grew up in the 1950s and 60s where National Geographic was lying around, certainly not my family’s.  In the 1960s, one had to be “recommended for membership” by another National Geographic Society “member” (i.e., subscriber) in order to be allowed the privilege of sending in your $6.50 for a year’s subscription (6 issues).  It was (and is still, sort of) a classy magazine, filled with its famously brilliant color photographs, thoughtful (well, at least lengthy) articles, and stunning fold-out maps.  Paper-bound but book-like in its “perfect” (not stapled) binding, each yellow-bordered issue was a little masterpiece, and demanded to be neatly stacked and saved, forever.

During the 1960s, National Geographic changed little in outward appearance, and continued to publish articles with titles that are the stuff of parody:  ”Finland: Plucky Neighbor of Soviet Russia,” or “The Incredible Salmon,” or “Brazil’s Stone-Age Tribes.”  The relatively few ad pages were filled with immense station wagons and Cadillacs; airlines; the occasional ocean liner; foreign countries; cameras and stereos. The classified ads were dominated by boys’ military schools, prep schools, and summer camps.

But National Geographic did not back away from international politics in this turbulent decade.  As early as October 1961, the magazine was reporting on the conflict in Southeast Asia (”South Viet Nam Fights the Red Tide”), and they had re-visited it at least three times before the issue pictured here.  This cover story is an exhaustively reported and lavishly illustrated story piece the “Montagnards” of Vietnam–the “primitive” mountain tribes caught between the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese and U.S. military troops.  The writer was Howard Sochurek, who at the end of 1967 visited Vietnam at the end of 1967 for  ”the eighteenth time in eighteen years . . . not, this time, to report on a maddening war, but to live for a time with a people trapped in its terrible jaws.”  Those two adjectives are just about the only editorializing the reporter allowed himself, but they are indicative of the general weariness and despair about the war that had come to characterize American popular opinion of the war by 1968–the worst year of the war in terms of the numbers of American casualties.

At first glance, the cover photograph of the boy appears to belong to that recognizable genre of NG photos:  ”Third-World-person-doing-something-strange.”  But inside one reads that this scene, too, has a back story rooted in the ongoing military conflict.  ”Hard way to hold a fish: A Mnong grips one with his teeth while hands reach for more. When fishing became poor, tribesmen discovered a new method–tossing grenades into the water.”

Blogging my way through 1968 is a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.  Last week, I went to the library, checked out Listen to the Warm by Rod McKuen, and –this is the tough part– read it, cover to cover.  Forty years ago, I could have eliminated the first two steps, because I owned it, of course; “everybody” did.  Don’t ask me what happened to my copy of this slim volume of poetry.  Clearly it was jettisoned at some point along my way out of the purple haze of 1960s countercultural “culture.”

But was McKuen part of the “counterculture”?  Could someone as wildly successful as this “best-selling poet of all time” be thought of as “counter” to prevailing culture?  Probably not.  By the early 1970s, McKuen had written well over 1,000 songs, which were recorded by various artists and pressed into more than 100,000,000 records.   He became exceedingly rich on music rights alone.  But in 1966, Random House brought out a new edition of a recent book of his poetry, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, and it became the 4th-best-selling non-fiction book of 1967, in the year-end tallies of Publishers’ Weekly.   Almost immediately, his next book–Listen to the Warm–was released, and it became the 3rd-best-selling non-fiction book of 1968, just behind the Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook and the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition.  What’s even more amazing was that numbers 5 and 8 on PW’s list of of the top ten non-fiction books of 1968 were two OTHER books of Rod McKuen poetry.  (Three others in the top ten were diet books, the beginnings of a new and mostly unabated trend in publishing.)

McKuen may have been the first poet to have a “brand;”  all of his books, starting with Stanyan Street, were exactly the same size and format, and were designed with a consistent graphic palette.  It’s quite a revelation to visit a library and see them all lined up there on the shelf.  (And, trust me, they’re all there; you have to wonder how often they get checked out.)

Rod McKuen was born in Oakland in 1933; biographical sketches dutifully recite his colorful resumé:  logger, ranch hand, railroad worker, rodeo cowboy, disk jockey, film and TV bit player, and, in the Army during the Korean War, a psychological-warfare scriptwriter. By the mid-1950s, he was performing and writing songs, and then turned to poetry.  By 1968, he had clearly become something of a “craze,” as people in 1968 might have called it–publicity and fame begetting more publicity, more fame, more sales.   McKuen books were extremely popular as gifts (the slim hardbound books retailed for about $4.50).  Even the library copy of Listen to the Warm that I checked out of the downtown Minneapolis library a few days ago seems, oddly, to have been “pre-owned”– it’s inscribed “To Jim, from Grandma Dorothy.”

How to explain the appeal?  What did it mean to be “quintessentially, the poet of ‘right now,’” as a NYTimes profile called him in 1971?  [William Murray, "It Doesn't Matter Who You Love. . ." NYT April 4, 1971].  McKuen was often discussed in the same breath as other contemporary poet-songwriters, such as Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, or he was included in the so-called chansonnier tradition best exemplified by Jacques Brel (whose work McKuen occasionally translated).  The same Times profile noted that McKuen was hugely popular on the concert circuit, drawing as many as 250,000 people in a summer 1970 tour, and that everyone in the audiences, regardless of age, “have the earnest, thoughtful concerned look of commitment characteristic of the middle-class college students and young marrieds who are, as the cliche goes, ‘prepared to work for change within the System.’”   For his fans, his poems must have been accessible but at the same time profound, “edgy,” even a little transgressive and daring (lots of talk about thighs and breasts).  He may have been saying, in his simple, sometimes painfully awkward lines, things that people in those unsettled, changing times wanted to be able to say to each other, but couldn’t:  ”I love the sea/but it doesn’t make less afraid of it/I love you/but I’m not always sure of what you are/and how you feel.”  (From Listen, number 14).  Or (from Listen, number 16):  ”This is daylight.  Turn and face me face-to-face./We’ll go naked in the afternoon/ and then you’ll see I’m only me./Were you expecting something more?//I taste like you–remember/because I’ve been with you so long/because we are each other as we are ourselves./All I have to fight/is what I’ve been for you before.”

More of this now available in your local library…..

And thoughts or memories about Rod McKuen, love, and poetry in the 60s?  Post a comment.

“Covering 1968″ will not strive to adhere to an “on this day in 1968″ pattern–but this particular cover of TV Guide just fell into my lap, and the coincidence of dates was irresistible.  Exactly 41 years ago, delegates to the Republican National Convention in Miami nominated Richard Nixon to be their candidate for president, setting into motion a tumultuous cascade of events that we will no doubt revisit again in later posts.

We will also come back to TV Guide itself again (and again) in future posts, and we’ll no doubt also revisit the two major political conventions of 1968.  For the moment, let’s just consider this image and what’s behind it– made perhaps all the more timely since the recent death of Walter Cronkite, the last survivor of this foursome.

The cover depicts the four anchor men of the three major television news shows:  David Brinkley and Chet Huntley of NBC; Cronkite of CBS; and Howard K. Smith of ABC.  In the context of TV Guide, this photo itself is extraordinary. In 1968, TV Guide was essentially the only popular magazine devoted to television–its business, programming, and celebrities.  Cover acreage was thus valuable real estate, and–not surprisingly–it usually went to television stars, often in groups, smiling and upbeat and appealing (and salesworthy).  Appearing on other summer 1968 TV Guide covers were Barbara Eden (”I Dream of Jeannie”); Johnny Carson; the stars of the various Andy Griffith shows and spinoffs; the “Gentle Ben” stars (including the eponymous bear); the “Star Trek” stars; the “Gunsmoke” stars.  Here, by contrast, is a cover with four dark-suited, middle-aged men, not looking at the camera, not particularly dour, but serious nonetheless.  In my memory (I was not quite 18 that summer), the anchors were all old men.  In fact, in August 1968, Huntley was 56; Brinkley 48; Cronkite 51; and Smith 54.  All middle-aged, male, white, World War II veterans–words that could also describe most members of Congress and anybody running for president.   These four men would be leading (”anchoring,” in the newly coined terminology) the coverage of the August conventions for the three (and only) national TV networks.  All of the networks would be liberally larding their coverage with comments from pundits– Gore Vidal, Art Buchwald, William F. Buckley, Eric Sevareid, Edwin Newman.  These four men and their acolytes were incredibly powerful cultural figures, but had become so only recently; the half-hour “CBS Nightly New with Walter Cronkite” had debuted just five years earlier.

An ad in this issue for the CBS coverage of the convention starting that week in Miami said that it would be “the most significant Republican convention of our generation.”    Television had been covering (to some extent) the national nominating conventions since 1948, and this year they would be broadcasting in color for the first time.  CBS and NBC would be offering “gavel-to-gavel” coverage, as had become their practice, and ABC would offer 90-minute nightly reports (with the option of pre-empting shows if something big happened).  As the lead article in this issue pointed out, “national political conventions are rapidly being calcified (thanks partly to TV) into ritual four-day affairs into fewer and fewer surprises”– a remarkable statement to anybody who thinks that pre-ordained, stultifying conventions are a recent phenomenon.

I was struck by the fact that ABC had already started opting out of wall-to-wall coverage of convention proceedings (or maybe they never opted in).  Surely they hoped this would be good for ratings, since ABC was always a distant third behind the two other networks.  This was also good news for TV watchers who were not fans of calcification.  On August 8, 1968, the night of Nixon’s acceptance speech in Miami (six years to the day before his resignation speech at the White House), viewers in the Twin Cities TV market could avoid NBC and CBS convention filler and catch ABC’s “Bewitched” and “That Girl” before tuning into convention coverage.  Or could flip over to NET (National Educational Television, the precursor of PBS) and watch “The French Chef” with Julia Child, followed by a show called “Yard ‘N Garden.”  Or, in Minneapolis, you could keep the dial on the local “independent” station and skip Nixon’s speech entirely by watching a 1959 movie starring Paul Muni: “The Last Angry Man.”   Talk about coincidences.

In the long hot summer of 1968, the ordinarily staid Saturday Evening Post published this astonishingly risqué cover.  (The Post was by now several  years into its attempt to re-brand itself as just the four-letter “Post,” to compete with Life, Look, and Time; it would change back to the full title in 1968 in a logo re-design, but the entire magazine folded in 1969.)   For most of the 20th century, the Post was famed for commissioning wholesome, high-quality (read: expensive) illustrations for its weekly covers.  Norman Rockwell was only the most famous (and probably the most wholesome) of the commercial artists who worked for the Post.  By the 60s, most of this had gone by the boards, though the Post continued to turn to Rockwell occasionally, at least until December 1963; his last cover for the Post was a memorial portrait of president John F. Kennedy.

Even Playboy cover girls in the 1960s were a lot more covered up than this model–the 23-year-old (maybe 24; accounts vary) Lauren Hutton, already a Vogue cover favorite.  (Ms. Hutton is probably not crazy about the nearly universal Internet descriptor of herself as the “gap-toothed supermodel.”) The model (unidentified in any way inside the magazine) displays a lot of midriff and a provocative decolletage while modeling what appears to be some art director’s idea of the garb of a Middle Eastern concubine.  ”What they’re wearing instead of clothes,” the headline says: “The Big Costume Put-on.”  ”They” in this sense is clear: “they” is not “us,” the middle-class, more than a little conservative grown-ups who read the “Post.”  ”They” is, simply put, “American youth.”  As the magazine’s editor, Bill Emerson, explains:  ”The turned-on people of today wear all sorts of extraordinary things instead of clothes. . . . You can very easily think . . . of clothing as weaponry. . . . It looks as if that curious subculture known as youth has ambushed us fogy-boppers with their costumes and is firing away.  The ammunition is not deadly, but it does make you feel angry and 150 years old.”
Buttressed by a photo essay deeper in the magazine, featuring numerous young people bedecked in slightly Edwardian or Indian or Elizabethan or military surplus or even vintage American fashions, Emerson waxes anthropological:  ”Man is changing his attitude about himself . . . This mind-boggling costume party has a much more serious message than simple disguise.  It may well be a part of a ritual effort to isolate a personality, and there is some question as to what will emerge.”

This cover story belongs to a genre that would by now be quite familiar to readers in 1968.  It might be called “Look at what those kids are (fill in the blank) now!”  The blank could be filled in with: wearing, saying, listening to, smoking, drinking, watching, listening to.  Magazine editors and photographers loved the so-called “counterculture.”  ”Those kids” made great pictures, they made great copy, and they sold magazines.  And if you could layer onto this head-shaking voyeurism a veneer of scholarly perspicacity, all the better.  Here that’s provided by none other than Marshall McLuhan (”maestro of media,” as SEP calls him), quoted extensively in this “Fashion” section.   A little McLuhan goes a long way, so here’s a little (we’ll revisit him again in a later post):  ”The mini-skirt, of course, is not a fashion.  It is a return to the tribal costume worn by men and women alike in all oral societies.  As our world moves from hardware to software [Ed. note:  This is 1968!], the mini-skirt is a major effort to reprogram our sensory lives in a tribal pattern of tactility and involvement.”